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Mark Nicol
Mark Nicol

Posted on

How do other people use gists?

Simple question for today, because I've just got round to looking at gists.

They seem a super useful idea but I'm not sure yet what I want to do with them. I could see they are a nice way of storing text and code snippets or useful for bookmarking. Some people have lovely looking book lists or to do lists.

I'm looking for inspiration. How are other people using them, has anyone seen any particularly fun or creative uses?

https://help.github.com/articles/about-gists/

Top comments (12)

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codechimp profile image
Andrew Jackson

I use them to store frequently used code snippets and then use Lepton on my desktop to quickly access them. With Lepton you put hash tags in your title and it will group gists together.

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Mark Nicol

Thanks I'd not heard of Lepton. Being able to group by hashtag sounds useful. I'll have to check it out.

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Meghan (she/her)

I use it for lots of random pastes mostly:

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Andre Christoga Pramaditya

I usually use it store my CLI configurations, my Keybase signature and my ZSH configuration. You can also use it to log translations though.

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Mark Nicol

Configs are certainly good. Wow though on your example it feels like there is a whole story to those translations.

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Burak Tokak

Me and few friends of mine have been taking notes in Gists, its simple and accessible, and version control is making it safer.

So excuse my shameless plug here, but we are making an app called Memo to make it way more accessable on desktop and browser (and mobile soon), check it out: usememo.com

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Quentin Sonrel

I use them to:

  • Store some config files that I don't really want on my Dotfiles repo on GitHub (because they are irrelevant and/or need to remain private)
  • Share a file with someone

And that's about it.

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Daniel O.

I've been using Github Gist for my notes and "blog post" for the last 4 years. The problem is that you don't get email notification for the comments. That's why I moved from Gist to Github pages + disqus.com.

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Matthew Daly

I use one to store my Neovim config. Since I manage my plugins with vim-plugged I only need one file.

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Mark Nicol

That's clever. I don't use Neovim but I can see how that could be used for other tools where it is a pain setting up all the plugins you're used to.

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Matthew Daly

Before I migrated from Vim to Neovim I was using Pathogen for my plugins. I kept all the files in a Git repository and installed the plugins as Git submodules, which was cumbersome. This approach is a lot more elegant and easier to update.

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Abhijit Parida

I have a gist containing useful scripts/snippets (like useful ffmpeg commands) that I used at some point.